{"id":308,"date":"2011-05-31T16:49:47","date_gmt":"2011-05-31T23:49:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/?p=308"},"modified":"2011-05-31T16:49:47","modified_gmt":"2011-05-31T23:49:47","slug":"test-this","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/test-this\/","title":{"rendered":"Test This"},"content":{"rendered":"

The \u201cTest This\u201d game pops up frequently in testing circles. Sometimes it pops up in the \u201cHow would you test a \u2026\u201d variety \u2013 e.g. How would you test a stapler. Participants in the game are expected to come up with functional tests (can it staple), as well as \u201cout of the box\u201d tests like, \u201cwhat happens if I drop the stapler off the top of my house\u201d (I guess it\u2019s a form of a reliability test). These are fun games, and while I suppose they do force some creativity, I don\u2019t think they really have anything to do with testing software<\/em>.<\/p>\n

There are better flavors of the Test This game. Sometimes, testers play the Test This game with real software. This form has huge potential, but never really delivers, as the software under test is typically a bug-infested piece of crap that anyone with a pulse could find bugs. Bugs are part of my problem with this form of Test This \u2013 the goal of this game is to find bugs \u2013 not to test or learn testing. That\u2019s an important distinction for me \u2013 the goal of testing isn\u2019t to find bugs. Finding bugs is merely a side-effect of the testing process. I fear that these exercises encourage testers to dive into bug finding before thinking about how<\/em> to test. To be clear, I\u2019m not talking about big-upfront-test-design \u2013 but a holistic approach to testing.<\/p>\n

As a side note, I really like what Weekend Testing<\/a> is doing with the Test This game \u2013 sure, they pick some buggy software sometimes, but they also pick real world apps and discuss test design (at the very least, in the debrief).\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Here\u2019s an example (I\u2019ve use this one often). This is the Microsoft Word font dialog from Word 2010. If my memory serves me correctly, this version may be less complex than the previous font dialog.<\/p>\n

Note:<\/strong> I\u2019m choosing this dialog because it\u2019s interesting. I don\u2019t know who tests this, and I bet they will have much better ideas on how to test this than me, but that doesn\u2019t matter.<\/p>\n

Ignoring the advanced tab and the functionality of any of the buttons other than OK or Cancel, how would you test this?<\/p>\n

You can spend as much time as you want (or use as little time as you need). I don\u2019t think I care about the actual tests as I care about how you decide what to test<\/em>.<\/p>\n

As always, you don\u2019t need to actually reply to this post \u2013 just do the exercise if you want. I\u2019ll write up some thoughts in a week or so and see if they make sense (I don\u2019t think I have any idea where I\u2019m going with this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The \u201cTest This\u201d game pops up frequently in testing circles. Sometimes it pops up in the \u201cHow would you test a \u2026\u201d variety \u2013 e.g. How would you test a stapler. Participants in the game are expected to come up with functional tests (can it staple), as well as \u201cout of the box\u201d tests like,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}